For the past few summers, I’ve found myself at events where Afrobeats plays alongside dancehall, soca, reggae, hip-hop, and R&B.
At this point, hearing Afrobeats in those spaces feels normal.
I still keep Shazam ready, though.
Some habits don’t go away.
That wasn’t always the case.
I started listening around 2012, at a perfect time in my life. I was transitioning from college into adulthood, figuring out who I was and what the next version of my life might look like. I didn’t know enough about Afrobeats to think about where the genre was headed or how big it might become.
I just knew I had stumbled into something infectious.
I was visiting my cousin after not seeing him for a few years. He has always been a funny guy, and at some point he started putting on what I now know was his attempt at a Nigerian accent—not really to mock anyone, but in the same way people sometimes put on a Jamaican accent because they think it sounds cool.
While he was carrying on, he played “Yori Yori” by Bracket.
The song immediately pulled me in.
It sounded familiar enough that I could connect with it, but different enough that I wanted to know where it came from and what else sounded like it.
I had stumbled into a new wave of African music and culture.
And I was hooked.
Before I Knew the Eras
I can almost trace my Afrobeats journey by remembering who was popping at different moments.
When I first entered the music, I was already catching up on an era that had been building without me.
There was P-Square.
D’banj.
Wande Coal.
Timaya.
Bracket.
Iyanya.
Then artists like Tiwa Savage, Yemi Alade, Skales, Orezi, and Reekado Banks entered my rotation.
Music from outside Nigeria became part of that same world too. Fally Ipupa from Congo. Joey B from Ghana.
At the time, I wasn’t concerned with technical genre classifications.
With Latin music, I already understood that different countries and regions had distinct traditions—dembow, reggaeton, ranchera, and plenty more.
African music was different for me because I was entering as an outsider who didn’t yet know all the borders.
If a song appeared in the same playlists, conversations, parties, and YouTube searches, it became part of the same musical universe in my head.
I loved hearing local languages and Nigerian Pidgin woven into songs. Slowly, words and phrases started sticking with me. “No wahala.” “Nyash.” Little pieces of language made me feel like I was getting hip to a culture I hadn’t known much about before.
And that world sounded different from the Afrobeats I hear today.
The early music I connected with felt bigger and more immediate.
The drums were up front.
The synthesizers were bright.
The hooks repeated until they were impossible to forget.
The rhythm felt faster, and so many songs seemed built around one basic instruction:
Move.
When the Dance Was Part of the Song
Then came the dances.
“Kukere.”
Azonto.
“Skelewu.”
Shoki.
For a while, the music and the dance attached to it seemed inseparable.
That resonated with me because I had already grown up around eras when songs arrived with movements attached to them: the Harlem Shake, the Dougie, “Crank That,” and plenty more.
So when I discovered Afrobeats, that relationship between music and movement felt familiar.
Fuse ODG became one of the artists I associated most with Azonto.
Iyanya had “Kukere.”
Davido had “Skelewu.”
Orezi had his moment with “Shoki.”
There was something communal about it.
I wasn’t just learning songs.
I was learning how people from another continent moved.
The music traveled with instructions.
Looking back, that is part of what made discovering Afrobeats feel different from simply discovering another artist.
There was music, fashion, slang, dancing, and an entire cultural energy moving together.
I was also meeting more African people who seemed increasingly comfortable celebrating where they came from. I noticed the pride. I noticed the flags, the slang, the music, the fashion. The culture wasn’t something happening at a distance anymore. I was starting to encounter it through people around me.
And discovery still required some participation.
A cousin played something.
A friend put me onto an artist.
YouTube sent me down another rabbit hole.
A DJ played something at a party, and I had to figure out what it was afterward.
Hence the Shazam habit.
When the Sound Started Changing
Wizkid and Davido were part of my listening long before they became household names in the United States.
Davido had “Gobe” and “Aye.”
Wizkid had “Don’t Dull” and “Pakurumo.”
Burna Boy was around too, already showing obvious hip-hop and Caribbean influences on songs like “Like to Party” and “Don Gorgon.”
But I didn’t experience Wizkid, Davido, and Burna Boy as some established “Big Three.”
That framing came later.
What stands out to me now is how much the sound itself started changing around the middle of the 2010s.
To my ears, 2016 feels like a dividing line.
Not because Afrobeats suddenly became something completely different, but because the qualities that would define the next era were becoming harder to miss.
The music started breathing more.
The beats didn’t always have to attack you.
The tempos relaxed.
The easiest way I can describe the difference is that some of the earlier Afrobeats I loved seemed to dance at you.
The newer music increasingly pulled you into it.
There was more space.
More mood.
More intimacy.
Songs could work at a party but just as easily live quietly in your headphones.
And I was getting older at the same time.
Maybe that is part of why I followed Wizkid’s evolution so closely.
Watching the Big Three Become Big
Davido seemed to reach another level first for me with songs like “If,” “Fall,” and later “Assurance.”
But Wizkid’s transition interested me differently.
I could hear him becoming smoother.
More patient.
More willing to let a song live inside a groove instead of constantly chasing a huge moment.
By the time he released Sounds from the Other Side, that direction was becoming clearer. “Come Closer” with Drake had an Afrobeats foundation but sounded completely comfortable beside Caribbean music, R&B, and American pop.
It didn’t feel like Wizkid was abandoning where he came from.
It felt like the walls around the sound were getting thinner.
Then Burna Boy exploded.
He had been making music for years, but suddenly it felt like one record after another was landing.
Then came Outside, followed by African Giant.
Songs like “Ye” helped turn a gradual rise into something much bigger.
These were no longer artists I expected to have to introduce to someone unfamiliar with African music.
America was learning their names too.
The music I once had to find was beginning to find everybody else.
The Album That Met Me at the Right Time
Then came Made in Lagos.
That was the album where Wizkid’s arrival in the American mainstream felt complete to me.
But my strongest connection to it has almost nothing to do with charts or crossover success.
It was personal.
“Blessed” reached me at exactly the right point in my life.
I was getting married.
I had my two children.
My priorities were changing.
There are periods of life when ambition gets loud.
You think about what’s next.
What you haven’t accomplished.
What you still need to build.
How much further you have to go.
“Blessed” reminded me to look at what was already in front of me.
Be here.
Pay attention.
You have a wife.
You have children.
You have a family.
You are living inside moments you will eventually miss.
The song became something like a theme for that stage of my life.
That might be the clearest example of why Afrobeats became more than another genre I enjoyed.
Different versions of the music kept meeting different versions of me.
The Word Got Bigger Too
By 2026, the Afrobeats I hear doesn’t have one sound.
Maybe it never truly did.
R&B is in there.
Dancehall is in there.
Hip-hop is in there.
House music is in there.
And South African amapiano has become impossible to ignore, especially its bass, spacious production, percussion, and unmistakable log drums.
Artists like Rema and Asake have pushed the sound in other directions.
Tems and Ayra Starr brought an R&B sensibility that can feel almost weightless.
The edges keep moving.
That is very different from what I thought Afrobeats was when my cousin played “Yori Yori.”
Back then, I thought I was discovering a sound.
Now I realize I was discovering an ecosystem.
When the Underground Becomes the Background
The growth has been incredible to watch.
Artists who once might have been placed in an “African music” category somewhere off to the side are now collaborating with some of the biggest artists in the world.
The exchange works in every direction.
African artists pull from R&B, hip-hop, dancehall, house, electronic music, and other genres while artists outside Africa increasingly pull from African rhythms, production, and vocal styles.
Sometimes deciding where one genre stops and another begins feels almost pointless.
There is something powerful about seeing that happen.
But whenever something becomes more accessible, something else changes with it.
Afrobeats is still part of my life.
I still enjoy it.
And I still go to events where hearing it tells me something about the room I’m entering.
If Afrobeats is playing alongside dancehall, soca, reggae, hip-hop, and R&B, there is still a good chance I’m walking into a space where Black culture will be present in a way that feels familiar to me.
For now, the music can still function almost like a signal.
You walk toward an event.
You hear that bass.
You recognize the song.
And somewhere in your head you think:
My people are probably in here.
There is comfort in that.
A kind of exclusivity—not because I think other people shouldn’t enjoy the music, but because certain sounds still carry information about the community surrounding them.
But I know that feeling probably has an expiration date.
As Afrobeats becomes more woven into American popular culture, hearing it will tell me less about who might be standing in the room.
That isn’t necessarily bad.
It is what happens when something grows.
But growth changes intimacy.
The Songs Became Timestamps
When I look back, I can hear my life through different artists.
P-Square, D’banj, Wande Coal, Timaya, Bracket, and Iyanya take me back to when all of this still felt new.
Fuse ODG reminds me of Azonto.
Mr Eazi and Maleek Berry remind me of when I first noticed the sound relaxing.
Davido reminds me of when Afrobeats became too big for America to keep treating it like something happening somewhere else.
Burna Boy reminds me of when African music seemed to stop asking permission to occupy global stages.
And Wizkid is the artist whose evolution probably overlaps most closely with my own.
From “Pakurumo” to “Come Closer” to Made in Lagos.
From discovering Afrobeats at my cousin’s house to hearing “Blessed” as a husband and father.
Those aren’t simply songs anymore.
They are timestamps.
Maybe that’s why part of me misses when Afrobeats felt more underground.
It isn’t really exclusivity that I miss.
I miss discovery.
I miss the feeling that every new artist opened another door into a culture I was still learning.
There was a time when somebody had to put me onto a song.
Now an algorithm can do it before I even know what I’m looking for.
But maybe losing some of that feeling is evidence of how far the music traveled.
Afrobeats no longer feels like something I’m finding.
It is simply something that is here.
And there is something beautiful about that too.
A sound I first encountered at my cousin’s house became part of summers, parties, weddings, family, fatherhood, and eventually the ordinary soundtrack of my life.
I got to hear the music change as I changed.
And even if one day Afrobeats becomes so woven into American popular music that hearing it tells me nothing about who might be standing beside me, I’ll still remember when it did.
I’ll remember “Yori Yori.”
I’ll remember learning the dances.
I’ll remember discovering the next artist and then the next one.
I’ll remember when the drums got slower and the music got smoother.
I’ll remember when the rest of America started paying attention.
And I’ll remember “Blessed” arriving when I needed a reminder to stop looking ahead and appreciate the life already happening around me.
Afrobeats is still part of the soundtrack.
It just doesn’t have to introduce itself anymore.